While "In Memoriam" is thus both a personal and a universal poem, it is also peculiarly the product of the nineteenth century. It certainly could not have been written in the eighteenth century, and it may be that before the end of the twentieth some parts of it will seem odd and oldfashioned. In a unique way it expresses the ideas of the age that produced it, and to many thoughtful students it has not seemed uncritical to call it the typical poem of recent times.

The age in which we live has been forced to think over again all the conceptions and theories inherited from the past. Modern science with its wonderful discoveries and its still more wonderful hypotheses has caused an intellectual upheaval surpassing any similar upheaval since the Renaissance. Many of the long-accepted commonplaces of philosophy and theology have fallen never to rise again. In consequence, numbers of earnest men have felt the traditional foundations of belief failing them, and have found themselves face to face with facts and theories which seemed to them cruel and unintelligible. Some have clung in despair to the traditional; some, in their impatience confounding essentials and non-essentials, have thrown aside everything that is old merely because it is old. In both of these courses we see extremes; both result in doubt, perplexity and gloom. Here and there, however, we discover a thinker who has taken the wise middle course, who has boldly faced the facts, by dissection freed the true from the merely traditional, and finally emerged from the struggle, strong in a new and firmer faith, buoyant with a brighter and wiser hope.

Such a thinker was Alfred Tennyson. From his youth even to his old age he was an enthusiastic student of natural science. He was, in fact, a typical modern man, wel

coming truth with an open and receptive mind, and daring to look squarely at the facts of the material world. He fully recognized the difficulties involved in the new views of nature and of life. Indeed, for a time, these difficulties seemed to him insuperable, and he was almost overwhelmed by a materialistic philosophy. But from this quagmire he at length emerged, by his experience better prepared to become an intelligent and sympathetic guide. The story of his soul during these years of catastrophe and reconstruction we find in "In Memoriam."

The secret of Tennyson's ultimate triumph is found in the fact that he was a poet as well as a scientist. His mind was too great to confine itself entirely to the facts revealed by the microscope or telescope, the scalpel or reagent. He recognized that there is a world within as well as a world without. During all his years of hesitation, the thought of his friend was ever present with him. He realized that their mutual love was a fact as certain and as vital as any revealed by star or egg or fossil. He felt that to be true to all the facts he must not ignore this fact. Accordingly, he posited Love as a necessary datum in his philosophy of life, and to this conclusion he clung,

"Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw

With ravin, shrieked against his creed,"

Moreover, he was thoroughly convinced that mere knowledge, however obtained, is not of itself capable of solving all the mysteries of life. He decided that it has to do only with "things we see," that it is "earthly, of the mind." And the mind, he asserted, is not the only tribunal. Upon this point his friend Arthur Hallam had written: "The great error of the Deistical mode of arguing is the assumption that intellect is something more pure and akin to

Divinity than emotion." With his friend's statement Tennyson fully agreed, and he determined not to fall into the error himself. He resolved to give "emotion" its rightful place, to listen to his heart no less than to his head. Already he had, as we have seen, by a process of mental reasoning, accepted love between human souls as a fact in his philosophy of life. Now, listening to his heart, he was carried further to the belief that love is not only within us but likewise without us, an essential part of the external universe. This belief which his heart had asserted, his intellect, when appealed to, affirmed, assuming that love must indeed be a part of the universal plan, since otherwise life would be nothing but a delusive mockery.

Something which he had frequently noted-which at first shocked and grieved him-was the fact that with the lapse of time our bereavements lose much of their poignancy. That regret itself should die, that love should change to indifference, seemed to him at first a certain evidence of man's weakness and selfishness. His grief he resolved to cherish. Yet even to him, after a time, came, in spite of himself, a lessening of the bitterness of grief, a renewed enjoyment of life. His harp would fain sound only notes of woe; but somehow,

"The glory of the sum of things

Would flash along the chords."

The truth was that the buoyancy of his spirit had got the better of his determination. It took some time for the spirit thus to assert itself; but the assertion was none the less positive and insistent. Tennyson finally accepted this cheerful self-assertion of his spirit as another fact in the problem. Believing that the spirit is divine and hence authoritative, he was finally willing to admit that it

may have some finer knowledge of the Eternal Verities than the intellect alone can give. This admission was one reason why he so carefully emphasized the chronological element in the poem. He wished to make clear the slow but steady influence of Time's healing touch.

The fundamental, conclusive idea of the poem Tennyson tersely stated in conversation during the last summer of his life:-"God is Love, transcendent, all-pervading! We do not get this faith from Nature or the world. If we look on Nature alone, full of perfection and imperfection, she tells us that God is disease, murder and rapine. We get this faith from ourselves, from what is highest within us, which recognizes that there is not one fruitless pang, just as there is not one lost good." (Memoir, I, 314.) A poetical statement of the same idea is found in CXXIV, and elsewhere.

This, then, is the significance of "In Memoriam." It is a poem in which a master thinker, in the presence of life's most serious problems, faces the difficulties squarely, finds them at first seemingly insurmountable, but gradually, by being true to the best within him, by accepting his spiritual self as an authentic oracle, and by positing Love as a universal law, attains through gloom and doubt and wistful yearnings to final faith and peace.

B.

It is a great mistake to regard "In Memoriam" as a series of disconnected poems. Tennyson, it is true, at first thought of calling his work "Fragments of an Elegy." At other times he spoke of the separate poems as "The Elegies." As the series grew into its final form, however, he saw that such a name would not be fair to his work or to himself. The poem, as it now stands, is a unit, and to be

rightly understood and duly appreciated it must be considered as a whole.

In order to consider anything as a whole it is first necessary to see the relation of part to part. All students of "In Memoriam" have accordingly felt the necessity of grouping the one hundred and thirty-one poems of the series in related sections. The poet himself felt this necessity and mentioned two different ways in which the grouping might be done. One method, mentioned by his son in the Memoir (I, 305), is by a four-fold division, the Christmas poems marking the breaks. The other was suggested by the poet to Mr. Knowles (The Nineteenth Century, XXXIII, 182). According to this plan there are "nine natural groups or divisions.” Some commentators have adopted one method; and some, the other; while still others have preferred groupings of their own. It would seem, however, that groupings given by the author should be preferred. Each of the plans mentioned by him has its advantages, and there is no reason why they should not be combined. In fact, they coincide except that the four-fold division makes a break at LXXVIII, whereas the nine-fold division does not. By recognizing this break, we find that the series falls into four "cycles, each of which, except the last, is subdivided into two or more groups. Each "cycle," except the first, and possibly the last, represents the thoughts and feelings of a year. Each is in a different mood; each marks a well-defined stage in intellectual and spiritual development.

It is, of course, not to be supposed that these time indications are exactly correct. "It must be remembered," wrote Tennyson, "that this is a poem, not an actual biography." (Memoir, I, 304.) The period covered by the compositions was, as a matter of fact, much more than three and one